I built an AI Tamagotchi before Meta could

The Verge's Sean Hollister bought a $50 Waveshare ESP32-S3 1.75C, a Meta-sanctioned devkit for building "Muse Gadgets," and found it nearly useless out of the box until he used Claude Code to add conversation history, spoken replies via ElevenLabs, a camera preview, multiple avatars, and a Tamagotchi-style minigame. He notes he has no coding experience and can't vouch for the code's quality, and that he keeps the device on guest Wi-Fi over privacy concerns. He concludes the appeal of dedicated hardware is reprogrammability rather than Muse itself, and wonders whether the real Muse Charm will be as freely programmable.